Tag: Issue 22

  • Event Horizon

    Grey glinting all around you, like the inside of a gun barrel illumined, how many steps will you pace in this greasy kitchen’s stacked circumference? How many tasks to pass the fullness of a day? In the hewing of tomatoes into flat wet wheels, in portioning hamburg like frankenstein fingerprinting brains, you become lost. You…

  • Where There’s One, There’s Many: Accessing Early Childhood Memories as Story Material

    A year after my father died, my wife demanded that I see a therapist, an idea to which I wasn’t averse given the positive outcomes from counseling I’d experienced at shaky moments in my past.  Michelle and I had spent my father’s last full night with him in his hospital room where I believe to…

  • Before/After

    I am ten and there is a barbecue at our house and Dad complains of a headache which is weird because he never complains and goes up to his bedroom to rest which is weird because it’s the middle of the afternoon but he is joking with his friends and he looks happy. The next…

  • Anything for a Friend

    I should have known it wasn’t going to end well when Sheila switched from strawberry wine coolers to boilermakers. But, I’ll admit it, I was sort of enjoying the dent she was putting in Greeley’s cocktail party, the brittle smiles and edgy eyes on the faces of his guests, a cross-section of stuffed shirts from…

  • The Gulf

    On his second day sailing from Tampa Bay northwest across the Gulf of Mexico, Dawson Melburn spotted a massive container ship coming out of the fog on his port side. The baritone blast from its horn echoed across the water, causing Daw to jerk the tiller. He immediately came about, not wanting to play chicken…

  • Staring Off Into

    NOON – Late twenties, they/them, peace and love and breathing it in, deeply humanist. JACOB – Early thirties, he/him, resourceful and ambitious, but also deeply sensitive. MADISON – Late twenties, she/her, anxious and a bit of a perfectionist, but deeply loving in her own way.   The first week of January. Public transit train noises.…

  • A Rare Find

    CHARACTERS: TATER……………man, 70s, Vietnam veteran, any race MONICA…………woman, mid 30s, attractive but worn out, any race TIME: 2019 (pre-pandemic) PLACE: Any town USA   AS HOUSE LIGHTS GO DOWN, we hear SFX of a car screeching around a corner, excited teenaged voices, and a bottle hitting an object, then smashing on the ground as the…

  • Juned Subhan

    Juned Subhan is a writer and English teacher from England. His creative writing has been published in numerous literary journals including Joyce Carol Oates’s Ontario Review.

  • Gerry Sloan

    Gerry Sloan is a retired music professor living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His poetry collections are Paper Lanterns (2011), Crossings: A Memoir in Verse (2017), and a generous selection in Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (2023). His recent work appears in Arkansas Review, Cold Mountain Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Slant, and Mid/South Sonnets. Website: gerrysloanpoetry.com